Credit: NASA

Orion of a Different Color
Even with a good telescope you won't come across a sight quite like this one. It is a familiar object though, the grand stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. But the striking picture combines images taken through three separate filters, each designed to record different emission lines -- light from sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms glowing in the tenuous nebular gas.

In this image, sulfur is red, hydrogen is green, and oxygen is blue, a color scheme used in images of other astronomical nebulae as well. While very different from what the eye sees, the image is still both beautiful and scientifically valuable, tracing elements and conditions within the nearby star forming region.

NASA Image of the day archive